


Acetone

by regalmilk



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman: The Killing Joke (Comics)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 17:43:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20568341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regalmilk/pseuds/regalmilk
Summary: “Men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, for everyone can see and few can feel. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are.”— MachiavelliIn Arkham, Bruce paints the Joker's nails.(A short sequel to The Killing Joke)





	Acetone

**Author's Note:**

> Set directly after the events of The Killing Joke.

_“Men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, for everyone can see and few can feel. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are.” _— Machiavelli

It might have been because of the rain, the roar of it. But words had been lost that night. They had been ambiguous and bruiseless, promising without promising anything. What is ‘rehabilitation’ really? Had he known when he offered it? Is it saving someone when their body hits the shore after they’ve already drowned? He hadn’t had an answer for any of these things. He had just been handing out words. Trying to negotiate some kind of twisted plea bargain over death. In spite of his code, even he must know that death is the end for everyone.

He does. Bruce Wayne does.

Batman does not.

He regrets laughing. It is the first thing he circles back to. He shouldn’t have laughed. He understands the metaphor behind the joke. It is so transparent it makes that white face seem almost delicate in his memory. He is the man who jumps the rooftop, offers the beam of his flashlight. The other doesn’t trust him. Or. Doesn’t want to trust him.

He regrets it more because Jim had overheard them. Overheard them as his men, his friends (his _real_ friends), had helped him gingerly into the back of one of the patrol cars. He had seen the commissioner’s face just as he was ducking down into the seat. The rain was falling harder, and the patriotic colors of the police lights overlapped with the darkness had made it impossible for him to read the expression there. But he had guessed. There was enough context. Confusion. Disappointment. _Anger_.

He regrets laughing because the Joker hadn’t _stopped_ laughing. Not even when the uniforms gathered around him and beat him to the ground.

Jim had shouted then, from the car. “No! No, goddamnit, stop! I said _by the book_!”

But a detective had barred him with his arm. Had closed the car door and told the cop in the driver’s seat to get him to a hospital. His daughter’s hospital.

Jim had looked back only once. Bruce had seen the harsh angle of his frown, the heaviness of his eyelids. Between the sirens, and the rain, and the Joker’s screeching laughter, Bruce had only imagined the depth of his sigh.

The Joker had laughed until there were tears in his eyes. Had laughed until bruises from the nightsticks blackened his face and arms. Had laughed until one came down in a particular way across the bridge of his nose. Laughed until his choking became like punctuation.

Like Jim, the Joker had looked at him too. Mud, and tears, and blood had mingled on his face. His eyes were black. His skin was almost more black than white. He looked isolated. Encircled by the rage and the egos of men who utterly hated him. And utterly loved Jim. He looked terrified.

“Stop.” Bruce had said, but they didn’t hear him. “Stop it!”

They didn’t want to hear him.

They had beaten the man who laughed until he fell unconscious.

It was when, even then, they did not stop that Bruce—that Batman—grabbed one by the collar and punched him to the muddy ground. Then they stopped. The others backed away, but their faces were not afraid. Not truly. Their faces were like Jim’s. Confusion. Disappointment. Anger. They glared openly at him with mouths as thin as paper.

“He…” It had been Bruce talking then. “He wouldn’t have wanted this.”

They had said nothing. They had circled him as they returned to their patrol cars. Like vultures waiting for a second opportunity. He had not given it to them.

When every pair of taillights had been swallowed by the night, Bruce knelt in the mud, in the rain puddles of the abandoned fairground. He had turned the Joker over on his back, wiped the grime from his face. Broken nose. He felt over his ribs. Three broken. Possibly more. His right shoulder had become dislocated, and Bruce took advantage of his unconsciousness to reset it. He knew it was not even close to the first time any of these things had happened. He knew it would not be the last.

—

On the drive to Arkham, with the Joker in the seat beside him, Bruce stops at Gotham General. It is this one stop that will determine what he does next. He goes to see Barbara.

Even in the middle of the night, she is awake, staring out the window after he appears in it, watching the rain. He removes the cowl. Her red hair is illuminated by flickering monitors.

“They told me my dad was just checked in.” Her voice is small, but it dominates the room.

“He’s…” Bruce lowers himself into the chair beside her bed. He wants to say Jim is okay, but it’s both a lie and an insult, and he doesn’t have the will for either. “He’ll be okay. So will you.”

Barbara laughs. Her blue eyes are steel. “I’m only even alive because he wanted me to be. He could’ve killed me. You know that. But he didn’t. Because he didn’t _want_ to. I was…”

“Barbara…”

“I was a fucking _toy_ to him. A chess piece…” Her voice becomes a lash. “…in the twisted fucked-up game the two of you have _always_ played.”

“Did he…” There is no delicate way to ask. But Bruce has to know. He has to. “Did he do anything to you… after?”

Barbara is quiet for a long moment. She is no longer looking out the window, or at him, but at the ceiling. “He shot me. He undressed me. He took pictures. Arranged me.”

She is speaking like she would to a therapist. Practicing. She will need one. She will need Bruce too. “He got one of his men to call the cops when he was done. And then they left.”

Bruce is holding her hand, squeezing it. His head is bowed before the window and his shadow falls softly over her stomach.

“He was very careful. Very clinical. It was _business_ to him.”

As he waits, Bruce can hear the clock ticking on the opposite wall.

“No,” she says finally. He hears the sheets rustle as she forces her body to turn toward him. “He did everything to me, in a way. Everything to make me less than human. But not that. Maybe some things… are beyond even him.”

She puts her other hand on top of his. He leans down and kisses it. Their eyes are wet beneath his shadow.

“I’ll be here,” he says before he leaves. “I’ll be here until you’re okay.”

Her lips part. Not a smile, but something even softer. “Then you’ll be here forever.”

“That’s the plan.”

And though it’s Bruce who says it, all Barbara hears is Batman.

—

Bruce looks at him again in the car. He is breathing deeply, but his cracked ribs provoke occasional muscle spasms as he does. In the quiet outside the hospital, beneath the portico lights, Bruce can imagine he is not a monster. When his eyelashes shudder, when he isn’t shooting girls or stabbing orderlies, when a tick of pain skitters across his face in his unconsciousness, Bruce can pretend he doesn’t deserve his cross.

_Maybe some things are beyond even him._

On the way to Arkham, Bruce takes him home. 

—

It is four in the morning, but Alfred is awake, starched and stoic, as Bruce pulls into the cave. His expression is the same as Jim’s had been. There is enough context. Enough for both of them, as even when the car’s hood slides back and Bruce stoops to pick up the Joker, Alfred only sighs. Bruce doesn’t need to imagine the depth of it this time. He can feel the weight of it on his shoulders.

“I’ll prepare the med bay,” is all his butler says.

As with all things that Bruce is compelled to do out of misplaced guilt, they will talk about this later. When everything is over.

“You should go upstairs, Alfred. Get some sleep,” Bruce tells him as he lays the Joker on the gurney. “I don’t want him to see you.”

“You should have thought of that before you brought him down here.” But he complies.

Before the elevator doors close around him, Alfred says, “Maybe it’s better, sir. To hate so much without knowing, than to know so much without hating.”

Bruce runs a few preliminary scans. Four ribs are cracked. Many more are bruised. Around his stomach is some slow internal bleeding. Bruce removes the Joker’s jacket, his waistcoat, and the collared button-up beneath it. He removes his gloves too, for no medical reason, just to strip something more away from him. Expose him. Make him less than human. He wraps a compression belt around his bare middle, just below his sternum, to help his ribs heal. His chest rises and falls, like any ordinary person’s. Once maybe, he was.

It is when he is wiping the filth from the Joker’s face with a damp cloth that a sliver of green opens to look up at him.

“Batman?” The voice is groggy. “Are you a dream? Have the good people at my _favorite haunt _pumped me full of antipsychotics already?”

Bruce brushes the cloth down the side of his cheek for a final time. He regrets this. “You’re not dreaming.”

“That’s what the drugs always say.” He tries to sit up, and Bruce, instinctively, reaches out to steady him as he doubles over. He regrets this too.

“You have four cracked ribs.” Bruce stops talking as the Joker runs his thin fingers over the wrap. His nails are unpainted. “You’re going to be in a lot of pain for a while.”

“And _that’s_ what the shrinks always say.” A grin drags itself across his lips, like a knife wound opening to bleed.

Bruce doesn’t say anything.

“Wait.” As he looks around, the smile fades. “This isn’t Arkham. Gotham’s finest were going to kill me, and _you_…”

His face changes and Bruce realizes it’s all cyclical. Confusion. Disappointment. Anger. But with the Joker, there is something else. Something that defining would cause the cycle to break. And Bruce doesn’t know how to live outside a circle.

“You saved me.” The Joker’s voice is different. Bruce knows he had wanted the words to squirm from his lips, dripping with mocking ridicule and vindication. But they come broken. Exhausted and unsure. Like a frightened animal whose cage has been latched so long, it fears everything outside it.

“I’m still taking you back to Arkham tonight,” Bruce tells him.

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” the Joker laughs with difficulty. “You brought me _here_ first.”

“Barbara said…” Bruce busies his hands with folding the Joker’s clothes. He is glad he sent Alfred up when he did, for as he folds, he imagines Alfred’s hands are his own, completing this task only because he was told to do so. The thought makes him sad. “…she said you didn’t touch her.”

The Joker closes his eyes as he sits fully upright. “I didn’t.”

“I believe her,” Bruce says. “That’s the only reason I brought you here at all.”

“Lucky me.” The words are almost toneless. “But if you don’t mind, I’d rather not overstay my welcome. I’ll let myself out.”

But as he moves off the gurney, a muscle spasm bolts through him, and he falls gracelessly to the floor. Despite himself, Bruce is there in an instant, a hand on his back to steady him.

“I told you to be careful,” Batman growls.

“No you _didn’t_,” the Joker hisses back. “You’ve _never _told me that.” 

He is trembling with pain.

And he is right. The implication was there, but those words have never been. He doesn’t know how dangerous they would be out loud. He doesn’t know what would happen if he closed the distance even that much. If he stepped outside the circle. They are already too close. His palm is hot against the Joker’s bare skin. And it occurs to him fully that Alfred might be right. He is afraid the more he knows about this man, the less he will hate him.

“You should be careful,” Bruce surrenders quietly. He pushes the stack of folded clothes into his arms, and picks him up off the floor. Because he is conscious now to feel his ribs being jostled, the Joker sucks in a sharp breath.

“Practice what you preach, Bats.”

Bruce smiles. “I did say you’d be in a lot of pain.” 

“Touché.” Then the Joker yawns. “Oh, I see. You can’t have me finding out where this place is, so you got me all liquored up on morphine and anesthetic.”

“Something like that.”

“And I bet you thought _I_… was the one who couldn’t… jump the roof…”

The Joker is asleep before they even reach the car.

At Arkham, the orderlies keep their heads down. They say little, and process the Joker’s admittance routinely. Bruce knows what they’re thinking. Knows what they’re thinking every time he escorts him back here personally. _Why won’t you just kill him?_

As Bruce lays him down on the bed in his designated cell, feeling his warmth and weight ease down, he can’t help but think of Barbara. How he should have been there, to carry her this way. And then Batman’s fists clench as his looks down at the Joker’s face. Asleep, breath tiding with each exhale.

No one should have had to carry her.

—

A few weeks later, Bruce hears about the assault. It turned out that the Joker hadn’t been entirely wrong. What was meant to be Jim Gordon’s bad day had simply ended up being someone else’s.

Two GCPD officers, two of the men who had been at the fairground that night, the man who _did_ carry Barbara Gordon from her home, and the man who helped Jim Gordon to the patrol car, had impersonated Arkham employees with clearance to the high-security wards.

They were stopped just before they killed him. The Joker was placed in intensive care.

Alfred is silent as Bruce pores over the article. He sets down the silver tea tray and leaves. But Bruce feels the gaze at his back. The weight of it alone almost makes him reconsider.

—

“I knew this would happen!” Jim yells, slamming his fist on his desk. “Even when he loses, he wins.”

“Jim.”

“What did I say? I said ‘we do this by the book’. They all heard it!” He pinches the bridge of his nose, eyebrows deeply furrowed. “I swear to god, every day it feels like another piece of this city slips out from under me.”

“You did the right thing.”

“_Did I_?” His voice breaks. “That lunatic is still alive—he’ll be back on the streets in no time. My own men—breaking into hospitals like thugs, assaulting patients. And Barbara…”

He pauses, drags a hand through his grey hair. “She’ll never walk again.”

His broad shoulders quake as he sobs. There is an empty bottle of scotch beside his commissioner name plate. Batman holds him.

Bruce stares at the ceiling.

—

A month later, Bruce puts in a visitation request at Arkham. The Joker has been moved out of intensive care and back to his old cell. With swift ire and no small amount of pride, Gordon had rescinded the badges of the officers who assaulted him. The act of false personation alone would have been enough to put them in Blackgate, but charges were never filed.

When Bruce arrives at the asylum, he recognizes the young woman at the front desk as the same one who had filled out the Joker’s paperwork the night Batman last brought him here. The cape and cowl, the blackness of them under the clinical white lights, never fail to draw attention, and she stops typing and glances up at him.

Her mouth twists and she looks nervous. Batman seethes. He asks the question they will never ask him. It is a provocation now. He has weaponized it.

“Why didn’t you just let them kill him?”

The woman, with her loose topknot and reading glasses, reminds him of Barbara when she had still been a librarian. Had it not been for Batman, maybe she still would be. Immediately, the woman lowers her eyes.

“It would’ve made your lives so much easier, right?” He growls. “Why didn’t you just look the other way for a bit longer? Ignore the call until he wasn’t your problem anymore?”

“We—” She pauses. Brings her eyes back to him. They’re blue, like Barbara’s, but lighter. “This was… different.”

“What do you mean?” He strives for rage, but something else edges in. There is something about her voice, the way she shifts uncomfortably in her desk chair, that alarms him.

“He would never tell you this, but,” she swallows the lump in her throat, “when we got to them… they were stripping him down. I think… they wanted to do to him what he did to that poor girl. It was personal for them. And he… he was laughing—I’ve worked here long enough to know that laugh every which way—but this time, it sounded almost like he could’ve been crying too.”

Bruce doesn’t know what to say, all his words are stuck in his throat, choking him. His fists are shaking at his sides. “I need to speak with him.”

“You’re all set,” she says very softly. “Tell him I said hi.”

As he is led down the hallways, through the wards and their varying degrees of poor lighting arrangements, the orderlies stop near a steel door. The too-familiar plate reads:

_Name Unknown 0801_

“Alright, well,” one of them offers awkwardly, because they have done this so, so many times. “Just buzz us when you’re done.”

And then they leave. Just as they’ve left dozens of times before. Has it been dozens? Sometimes he is hit with a truly hollowing emptiness when he thinks of how long they’ve really been doing this. The two of them.

Bruce stands there for a moment, wondering if this is a mistake. If he should just leave and pretend he was never here. The distance has already closed so much. In his mind, he can perfectly picture Alfred’s distress, shaking his head in disapproval. He knocks on the cell door.

He waits. But nothing happens. So he knocks again. After a long while, he decides to leave. There will be other days. It doesn’t have to be this one. Almost as soon as he turns on his heel, he stops.

“What?” The voice snaps through the cell’s window bars.

Still, Bruce hesitates. But slowly, he turns back to the door and peers into the dark room. It is lit only by a single dim lamp, hung from the ceiling. He takes a breath. Grips the handle of the small plastic organizer he’s carrying.

“Harleen says hi.”

—

They sit at the small table under the hanging lamp. The deck of cards the Joker normally preoccupies himself with is not on the table. Dozens upon dozens of cards are strewn across the floor. The lamp cuts a sliver of yellow light over them. The Joker’s hands are folded in his lap and he stares down into it. His brow is veiled by a harsh shadow.

Bruce doesn’t know what to do with his own hands. But Batman reaches out and presses one large palm over the white face. He brushes the pad of his thumb over the skin beneath the Joker’s eye. It is faintly purple and yellow, the ghost of a much deeper bruise. The latter doesn’t look at him, but he makes a soft sound in the back of his throat. Bruce swallows hard, and takes his hand away.

“I have to be sure it’s really you,” Batman says as he observes his gloved fingers. There is no makeup residue there.

“Of course.” The voice sounds scratched. Used. “I would expect nothing less from you.”

“Harleen told me—”

“Oh, Harleen, _Harleen_.” A dangerous sing-song. “That girl is always making up such clever little stories. Always with the laughs. She’s such a—”

“Joker.”

“_What do you want me to say?_” The sing-song becomes a snarl. “So Jim Gordon didn’t have the day I planned for him. We all have to have a consolation prize or two. Maybe those officers were mine. Maybe I… am _yours_.”

Bruce stands up so suddenly he almost knocks over his chair. “This was a mistake. You’re just playing your little games. Wasting my—”

He stops. The Joker’s hand is clamped around his wrist. He’s not wearing gloves. His fingernails are bare.

“Don’t.”

The word is so quiet that Bruce thinks he imagined it. It means so many, too many things. Bruce sinks back down into the chair. The Joker doesn’t let go of his wrist.

“I can never,” Batman says with his teeth. “I _will never_ forgive you for Barbara.”

The grip tightens.

“But this…” Bruce starts, glancing at the bruises and half-healed wounds, and he can’t finish. So he tries again. “Lay your hands out flat on the table.”

As he tilts his head, the shadow retreats, and green eyes peer out at Bruce. The hand falls away from his wrist. The Joker obeys.

Bruce reaches down to the floor and brings up the small plastic organizer. He clicks it open and pulls out a bottle of acetone. He soaks a cotton ball in it, and takes each of the Joker’s slender fingers within two of his own and blots each nail with the solvent.

The Joker watches him. His hands are relaxed, soft. Scabbed over in places where fresh skin has been torn away. He doesn’t fidget or pull. The pad of each finger falls lightly back to the table’s surface when Bruce releases it.

He takes a bottle of nail polish from the kit. It is black. It could only be black. For both of them. He shakes the bottle a bit, twists off the cap and strokes the nail brush against the lip of the bottle, milking out the excess polish.

The Joker’s pupils are dilated, the green almost overthrown.

Bruce repeats the ritual, taking each thin finger in his own, and applies the dark coats slowly, evenly. Neither of them speak. Bruce is so careful, so deliberate, that when he finishes all ten nails, the first five are nearly dry. He begins the second coat.

By the time he is applying the top coat, Bruce can no longer handle the silence. He doesn’t quite know how to fill it though, and he is not ready for the result. How much distance he closes with every stroke of the nail brush. He tries to smile, but his mouth gets tangled on it. “Does this remind you of a joke?”

“No.” The response is immediate. Dark and visceral.

It unnerves Bruce. His fingers quiver and the brush makes a wobbly errant line of paint over the Joker’s nail fold. Bruce reaches for the cotton ball of acetone, but the Joker stops him.

“No,” he says again. “Don’t fix it.”

Bruce doesn’t. He continues. When the top coat is finished, the Joker’s fingers once again lay delicately upon the table. Bruce folds his arms across its surface, resting his chin on them. He is at eye level with the Joker’s hands. Bruce inhales sharply. The Joker closes his eyes.

Bruce blows on his nails.

The first breath is short and unsteady, but each one, low and gentle, is like a quiet storm in the smallness of the cell.

He does this for what feels like hours. But Bruce is patient. Every now and then, he stops to press the pad of his thumb against a black nail plate, testing its dryness. The first time he does this, the warmth of his gloved fingers over stark white skin, the Joker shivers.

When his nails are dry, or nearly dry, the Joker’s eyes remain closed.

Bruce takes the last small bottle out of the kit. A vial of honey-colored cuticle oil. He removes his own gloves for this part. He tells himself it’s for convenience, but that is not why he does it.

Again he teases the glass lip with the nail brush, and smooths the oil over each of the Joker’s now-black nails. They glisten in the lamplight, their wet sheen made yellow, like the headlights of the patrol cars that night in the rain.

Bruce takes each finger again, and with his thumb, rubs the oil over the Joker’s nails. Into the folds, the cuticles. Bruce massages the roots, swipes his thumb softly against the rim of the Joker’s nail beds. The first time Bruce’s nail brushes the underside of one of the Joker’s, electricity crackles in the hot thread-thin space between their fingers. The Joker makes the barest sound. A gasp. A moan. Something too in-between to define.

Bruce bites his own tongue every time it happens again. There is something acutely invasive about it. It is so very intimate. The overlap of their nails closes the distance in a way that can never be undone.

Not by Bruce.

Not by Batman.

When he is finished, Bruce returns everything to the plastic organizer and clicks it shut. The Joker opens his eyes then. His long eyelashes flutter as he looks up at Bruce pointedly. His gaze is both predatory and terrified. The change is not lost on him either. For Bruce, it is unmistakable.

Bruce stares down at his nails. The polish is mostly clean, except for the moment when Bruce had wavered. His undoing is marked by a black splash over the Joker’s right ring finger.

Then, the Joker leans forward, his eyes like glass. He lifts his hands and drags the backs of his fingers burningly down both sides of Bruce’s face, over and under the cowl. His eyes soften, but he says nothing. Lingers, and then draws back, his hands pressed into the table again.

“I think they’re dry.” His voice is like smoke.

Bruce averts his gaze. He replaces one of Batman’s gloves. Before he puts on the other, he reaches out across the table, and brushes his thumb over the Joker’s face, across his cheekbone, a callous over bruises.

“I have to be sure it’s really you,” Bruce says.

“You’re the only one…” The Joker folds his hands together, careful not to scuff the polish. The look of greed and abject fear is once again in his eyes. The lamplight exposes his tears. The trembling red smile, pinned to his face like a butterfly. “…who could ever tell.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments always loved and appreciated.
> 
> tumblr: @ [regalmilk](https://regalmilk.tumblr.com)


End file.
